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Broad Call for Faster Action on School PCBs

By Sharon Otterman October 7, 2010 5:23 pmOctober 7, 2010 5:23 pm

A coalition of elected officials and unions called on Thursday for faster action from the city and federal government to monitor and, if necessary, remove hazardous chemicals known as PCBs from as many as 700 city schools, calling the problem a “serious health threat.”

A pilot study by the city this summer found elevated levels of the chemicals in all of the three schools tested: P.S. 199 in Manhattan, P.S. 309 in Brooklyn and P.S. 178 in the Bronx. Even after removing fraying caulking and old fluorescent lighting fixtures that contained the material, the PCB levels remained elevated at P.S. 199 and P.S. 309 beyond the recommended guidelines of the Environmental Protection Agency.

All 13 members of New York City’s Congressional delegation sent a letter on Thursday to Judith Enck, the regional administrator of the E.P.A., asking the agency to take over primary responsibility for the problem from the city Department of Education, which plans no further action until next summer, when it will test two more schools in an ongoing pilot program.

“We are concerned that these results indicate that the problem of PCBs in New York City schools is more severe than previously contemplated,” the letter said.

Students continue to attend classes in classrooms that have been shown to have the elevated PCB levels, and no official guidance, such as a recommendation to keep windows open, has been issued to teachers in those classrooms, said Natalie Ravitz, a Department of Education spokeswoman.

Ms. Ravitz said that the city “agreed with experts who say there is no immediate health risk to our children.” The E.P.A. guidelines, she added, applied only to long-term exposure and the city was still examining whether sitting in a classroom with the indicated levels of airborne PCBs qualified.

“We believe it would be irresponsible to move forward with a citywide plan — which potentially carries a billion dollar price tag — before we have better information and complete this pilot project,” she said. “We don’t have all of the answers yet.”

PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are a class of highly toxic chemical compounds that were widely used in construction materials and electrical products in many buildings from the 1950s until they were phased out starting in 1978. With long-term exposure, they can cause cancer and affect the immune and reproductive systems.

The city, in an agreement with the E.P.A., agreed to take the lead role in remediation and testing in January in the more than 700 schools built during that period, but the elected officials gathered outside City Hall Thursday afternoon said that they wanted the E.P.A. back in charge.

“With federal intervention now, we hope to avert what could become a serious public health issue for New York,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler said. Seventeen state legislators, including Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, also sent a letter to the E.P.A. asking for further action.

The E.P.A. has already recommended that the city come up with a plan for removing the lighting ballasts of old fluorescent lights if they were shown to be releasing PCBs, as well as the caulking. The lighting fixtures had not been covered in the January agreement.

But in a statement Thursday, the E.P.A. did not express a need to speed up the timeline, saying the pilot study was working to provide important information.

“The levels of PCBs found in the three tested schools do not pose an immediate health risk in the short term,” said Bonnie Bellow, the director of the E.P.A.’s regional public affairs division. “We are exposed to lots of things every day that have risks, and the question is how much and for how long.”

Ms. Ravitz said the city had already spent $3 million to replace all the lighting fixtures at two of the pilot schools, and that work to reduce the exposure levels there was ongoing.

And will the NY Times still print the lies of Bloomberg and Kline about how much they “care” for minorities? let’s see, Bloomberg doesnt mind minorities being exposed to poison or police brutality and illegal quotas, so how can a newspaper bother to repront his lies about how he is the “education” mayor?

Yes – OF COURSE all known sources of PCBs in NY schools and public buildings should be removed. But the sad truth is that a poor child who eats contaminated fish caught by his father in the Hudson River – or a well-to-do child whose parents give him certain brands of fish oil pills – may get doused with more PCBs in a single day than from 12 years of exposure in school. Of course the operative word is MAY since nobody knows the actual human exposure rates in schools from ambient air or skin contact.

I don’t think anyone can disagree with the fact that PCBs should not be in the classrooms, but who can possibly afford this remediation effort? Any once the federal government steps in, who is to say that all of the cleanup funds should be poured solely into the NYC school system? What about the rest of the country’s schools?

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